How to make failure your friend and teacher in science

How can the apprenticeship model and its focus on practice making perfect apply to science?

Roger Kneebone’s 2020 book Expert compares molecular scientists to Savile Row tailors, lacemakers to vascular surgeons. Kneebone, a former trauma surgeon who how leads a master’s programme in surgical education at Imperial College London, says the road to professional expertise begins with an “apprentice” phase, doing monotonous tasks repeatedly and learning from mistakes.

Ruth Morgan, a crime and forensic science researcher at University College London, says: “Whether you’re learning to do a titration in the lab, or whether you’re learning to cut material as a tailor, there are so many mistakes that you make in that process. And that’s kind of the point. Every time you make a mistake you get better, and there’s a huge amount of time spent doing that.”

Earlier this year, Morgan joined Kneebone at a conference session on failure and expertise, part of a one-day failure in science conference, held at Imperial College London in partnership with Nature.

In the fourth episode of a six-part podcast series that revisits some of the conference themes, Morgan says successful collaborations across scientific disciplines rely on individual researchers seeing themselves as “outsiders, beginners”, unafraid of asking questions. “That’s incredibly scary” she says, “because it means you have to concede that you don’t know something, and you’re having to ask.

“It’s quite a distinctive skillset to cultivate. You have to be willing to be uncomfortable, to really drill into what you know, but what you don’t know, and to become a really good listener, so that you can hear what somebody else in a different space sees or knows."

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-03654-3

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Transcript

How can the apprenticeship model and its focus on practice making perfect apply to science?

Ruth Morgan 00:06

We talked about the taxonomy of failure and how that can look throughout the life cycle of expertise, as a necessary companion, and a teacher, that is on the journey with us as we go from being essentially an apprentice through to becoming more expert.

Stephen Webster 00:25

That’s Professor Ruth Morgan reporting back from the failure and expertise session in a conference held at Imperial College London, in April 2026.

Ruth Morgan 00:37

We talked about intrinsic failure that seems to be inherent whenever you’re working at intersections, whether that’s an intersection of two different disciplines that maybe look at failure or perceive failure in different ways.

Stephen Webster 00:49

I’m Dr Stephen Webster, director of the Good Science Project at Imperial, a programme that examines what we like about research culture, and what we don’t.

In episode four of this series about failure in science, we explore the benefits and the pitfalls of being an expert in your field.

Ruth Morgan 01:10

The thread that really brought all that together was this idea of the potential for failure and the pain.

So, the importance of the wrestle, which is a term I’ve been thinking about a lot recently.

We have to create spaces to be able to wrestle with an idea, with the potential for failure, with difference of perspectives, difference of opinion, different ways of seeing things.

And there can be pain in that.

The pain is there in both in the way they come together is quite deeply and profoundly part of being human, and part of innovation and discovery and curiosity.

There we go.

Is that about where we got to?

So I’m Professor Ruth Morgan. I’m based at UCL and professor of crime and forensic science.

Anyone who’s been working in this kind of space for any length of time can think of far too many personal failures.

But I guess a very public one that I can share with you was when I set about trying to crowdfund a very large sum of money to build an evidence interpretation lab, which would have been the first one in the world.

And it was all going really well.

And I actually even ended up working with a big advertising agency, and we had we had billboards on buses through London.

We had a film that was in every single independent cinema in the UK for four months, I think.

And it was incredible. It was a beautiful piece of storytelling, and we raised about £4.25. The target was a million, so we fell short there. So that was a fairly public failure.

But there is now a lab.

We got there a very different way.

So in the failure and expertise session that we had at the conference, our discussion was curated and led by Professor Roger Kneebone, who’s the author of the book Expert, and he talks very beautifully about this journey that you go on from being an apprentice, building your expertise to the point where you become an expert.

And one of the things that we really explored in that conversation was around how, when you’re learning as an apprentice, you have to do the same task again and again and again.

It’s very monotonous. And there’s a huge amount of failure involved in that.

So, whether you’re learning to do a titration in the lab, or whether you’re learning to cut material as a tailor, there are so many mistakes that you make in that process.

And that’s kind of the point.

Every time you make a mistake you get better, and there’s a huge amount of time spent doing that.

And it’s only as you go through that do you start finding the little shortcuts and heuristics and ways of seeing it that you have gained through all of those failures, and to the point of then becoming able to then teach others and be seen as an expert.

So there’s this idea that failure becomes something of a companion as you go through that journey. And it’s absolutely intrinsic to building expertise, to gaining that craft.

So the Heurista Institute came about, we got to this idea that there are an awful lot of complex challenges in the world, and you could argue that in many ways they’re getting more complex.

So the more you can explore them, the more you know about them, actually, the more complex they get.

What if the answer to a lot of these problems is less about creating new knowledge, and it’s more about bringing together existing forms of knowledge, but in different ways, asking different questions, and making connections that maybe haven’t been made before that move us forward in a sort of stepwise change moment?

So it’s about how do we bring those different perspectives together, those different disciplines together, in a structure within a university which is quite delineated by disciplines, and those boundaries are often quite clear.

And also, how do we traverse and bridge the boundaries that exist with and around that university system, with industry, with government, with other sectors where that insight is needed, and who can actually do stuff with it and actually make a difference?

And so we, yeah, so that’s how the institute came about.

Can we bridge those gaps between disciplines, and can we bridge the boundaries that exist between the university and the real world?

One of the things that is extraordinary about working at these intersections between different disciplines is that it really opens up the opportunity to be an outsider, to be a beginner, and to ask questions.

And that’s incredibly scary, because it means you have to concede that you don’t know, you don’t know something, and you’re having to ask.

But it also levels the field, if you like, and it actually makes people more open to asking those questions and being challenged in ways that help you see things in different ways that you might not have been able to see in a different context.

So it’s quite a distinctive skillset to cultivate.

You have to be willing to be uncomfortable, to really drill into what you know, but what you don’t know, and to become a really good listener, so that you can hear what somebody else in a different space sees or knows.

And then start that translation work, of translating between those different perspectives.

One of the things that we’ve really noticed in the work that we do is that our sort of starting point was we want to bring all these different perspectives together so that we can find the points of resonance, the places where people agree, because that will really help us at these intersections, work out maybe where to go next.

So failure in that sense, I think, is very, very interesting because, in some ways, you’re having to unlearn everything you’ve learnt What it means to be an expert in a particular discipline, you have to be willing to put that down in some ways, and to come into a space that you don’t understand.

Jen Woods 08:04

And what does it mean for trust in science? I think at the moment we’re really looking into a storm of events that really question expertise, trust in science.

And the challenge to the trust in the scientific process and new knowledge and evidence that it generates, I think, is a serious perspective around the erosion of social cohesion.

Ruth Morgan 08:37

So, in the opening session, Professor Jen Woods was talking about this sort of post-trust world and this observation that there’s a lack of trust in experts and how, where that’s taking us as a society.

And I think it’s really, this is a really fascinating area, because there’s something here about the the contract that exists between science and society, and how that has changed.

So, if we think about 80 years ago, we had an understanding that governments would fund scientists.

They had a lot of freedom and autonomy, and there was a lot of trust there that what the scientists discovered would be valuable and would bring about good in society.

And we saw lots of things emerge from that. I think washing machines is a great example, for example.

But out of that also came some things that maybe were more questionable, people weren’t quite so sure about.

And there has been a notable shift in the way that society and science interact with each other, and you could argue that where we are today is much more of a transactional relationship, where there are certain needs in society that are put to the science community.

And those are the areas where we would like science to focus, to find solutions that will benefit society and often the country within which those scientists are working.

So I think that overarching change in the way that we work within society is quite interesting

And I think it speaks a lot about the value and importance of science being done with and for people, not to and at them.

And there’s also something very interesting then about this, is this role of experts, and this idea that there’s a production in trust in experts.

And I just find this very fascinating because what we mean by trust is quite variable.

So the work from the Pew Research Institute talks about, they do lots of surveys to look at where where is trust in society, and actually scientists are actually quite high up and they haven’t fallen hugely.

So other experts have lost trust, but scientists are still quite high up.

Where the trust goes down is when scientists are starting to get involved in policymaking.

So that’s the nuance here, that there’s trust in science and there’s trust in scientific experts.

But there’s less confidence when those experts are perceived to be moving outside of their specialist domain and into more applied settings.

So I think there’s something very important here about how do we navigate a world where we believe that science has a huge amount to offer society, where science embedded into the way that we build our societies is going to add value and bring about things that we would want to uphold in society.

But how do we do that in a way where there is dialogue and transparency in terms of what can science do, what questions can it ask, what answers can it give, and not overstretch or end up putting science in a place where it probably isn’t meant to be.

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